Colgate Directory

Elana Shever

Elana Shever is a cultural anthropologist with interests in natural resources and materiality, corporations, neoliberalism, globalization, and capitalism. Her work has examined the relationship between large-scale political-economic processes and intimate transformations in personhood. She has conducted research in Argentina, Colombia, and the United States.

Dr. Shever's first book, Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2012) explores how people’s lives intersect with the increasingly globalized and concentrated oil industry through a close look at Argentina’s experiment with privatizing its national oil company in the name of neoliberal reform. Examining Argentina’s conversion of its state-controlled oil market to a private market, the book reveals interconnections between large-scale transformations in society and small-scale shifts in everyday practice, intimate relationships, and identity. It offers a window into the experiences of middle-class oil workers and their families, impoverished residents of shanty settlements bordering refineries, and affluent employees of transnational corporations as they struggle with rapid changes in the global economy, their country, and their lives. Resources for Reform reverberates far beyond the Argentine oil fields and offers a fresh approach to the critical study of neoliberalism, kinship, citizenship, and corporations.

This study has led to Dr. Shever's continued involvement in developing the critical ethnography of corporations, exemplified by her contribution to the forthcoming Wiley Blackwell International Encyclopedia of Anthropology.

Dr. Shever's current book project examines how public scientific knowledge is created within the United States through an ethnographic study of contemporary engagements with dinosaurs, and people's multiple interpretations of them. Dinosaurs offer an especially sharp lens to study science in society because of their widespread popularity and frequent use in both education and entertainment. This project explores how various groups of people interact with, and understand, dinosaur artifacts, including fossils, casts, models and images. It aims to uncover how knowledge is created through the interactions among people, and between people and things. Dr. Shever has been conducting the ethnographic research for this project at museums, parks and tourism venues in the Denver metropolitan area, and paleontological excavation sites in the American West.